The Evolution of Consciousness

Schmidt Number: S-5396

On-line since: 15th April, 2009

I

First Steps towards
Imaginative
Knowledge

Throughout
the ages, understanding the world has been closely associated with
understanding man himself. It is generally recognised that in the
days when not only material existence, but also spiritual life, was
taken into consideration, man was looked upon as a microcosm, as a
world in miniature. This means that man in his being and doing,
in the whole part he plays in the world, was viewed as a
concentration of all the laws and activities of the Cosmos. In
those days it was insisted that understanding of the universe could
be founded only on an understanding of man.

But here, for
anyone who is unprejudiced, a difficulty arises at once. Directly he wants
to arrive at so-called self-knowledge — the only true knowledge
of man — he finds himself confronted by an overwhelming
riddle; and after observing himself for a time, he is obliged
to own that this being of his, as it appears in the world of the
senses, is not completely revealed even to his own soul. He has
to admit that for ordinary sense-perception part of his being remains
hidden and unknown. Thus he is faced with the task of extending his
self-knowledge, of thoroughly investigating his true being, before he
can come to knowledge of the world.

A simple
reflection will show that a man's true being, his inner activity as an
individual, cannot be found in the world that holds good for his
senses. For directly he passes through the gate of death, he is given
over as a corpse to the laws and conditions of this sense-perceptible
world. The laws of nature — those laws which prevail out there
in the visible world — seize upon the physically dead man. Then
that system of relationships, which we call the human organism, comes
to an end; then, after a time depending upon the manner of his
disposal, the physical man disintegrates.

From this
simple reflection, therefore, we see that the sum of nature's laws, in
so far as we come to know them through sense-observation, is adapted
solely to breaking down the human organism and does nothing to build
it up. So we have to look for those laws, for that other activity,
which, during earthly life, from birth or conception to death, fight
against the forces, the laws, of dissolution. In every moment of our
life we are engaged with our true inward being in a battle with
death.

If now we
look round at the only part of the sense-world understood by people today,
the mineral, lifeless world, this certainly is subject to the forces that
signify death for the human being. It is pure illusion for natural
scientists to think they could ever succeed, by relying on the laws
of the external sense-world, in understanding even the plants. That
will never be so. They will go some little way towards this
understanding and may cherish it as an ideal, but it will never
be possible really to fathom the plant — let alone the animal
and physical man himself — with the aid of the laws which
belong to the external world perceived by man.

As earthly
beings, between conception and death, in our true inner being we are
fighters against the laws of nature. And if we really want to rise to
self-knowledge, we have to examine that activity in the human being
which works against death. Indeed, if we are to investigate
thoroughly man's being — which is our intention in these
lectures — we shall have to show how, through a man's earthly
development, it comes about that his inner activities ultimately
succumb to death — how death gains the victory over the hidden
forces opposing it.

All this is
intended to show the course our studies are meant to take. For the truth
of what I am now saying will be revealed only gradually in the various
lectures. To begin with, therefore, we can merely indicate, by
observing man without prejudice, where we have to look for his
innermost being, for his personality, his individuality. This is not
to be found within the realm of natural forces, but outside
it.

There is,
however, another indication — and such indications are all I want
to give to-day — that as earthly men we live always in the present
moment. Here, too, we need only be sufficiently unprejudiced to grasp
all that this statement implies. When we see, hear, or
otherwise perceive through our senses, it is the actual moment that
is all-important for us. Whatever has to do with the past or the
future can make no impression on our ears, our eyes, or on any other
sense. We are given up to the moment, and thereby to
space.

But what would
a man become were he entirely given up to the present moment and to space?
By observing ordinary life around us we have ample proof that, if a
man is thus completely engrossed, he is no longer man in the full
sense. Records of illness give evidence of this. Well-authenticated
cases can be quoted of persons who, at a certain time in their lives,
become unable to remember any of their former experiences, and
are conscious only of the immediate present. Then they do the
craziest things. Contrary to their ordinary habits, they buy a
railway ticket and travel to some place or other, doing everything
necessary at the time quite sensibly, with more intelligence, and
perhaps with more cunning, than usual. They have meals and do all the
other little things in life at the normal time. On arrival at the
station to which they booked, they take another ticket, going
possibly in an opposite direction. They wander about in this way, it
may be for years, until they come to a stop at some place, suddenly
realising they don't know where they are. Everything they have done,
from the moment they took the first ticket, or left their home, is
blotted out from their consciousness, and they remember only what
took place before that. Their life of soul, the whole of their life
as human beings on earth, becomes chaotic. They no longer feel
themselves to be a unified person. They had always lived in the
present moment and had been able to find their way about in space,
but now they have lost their inner feeling for time; they have lost
their memory.

When a man
loses his inner feeling for time — his really intimate connection
with the past — then his life becomes a chaos. Experience of
space alone can do nothing to help towards the health of his whole
being.

To put this
in other words: A man in his sense-life is always given up to the moment,
and in some cases of illness it is possible for him to detach his
immediate existence in space from his existence as a whole —
but he is then no longer man in the full sense.

Here we have
an indication of something in man belonging not to space but only to
time; and we must say that if one human experience is that of
space, there is also another which must always be present in a man
— the experience of time. For him to remain man in the full
sense, memory must make the past present in him. Being present in
time is something indispensable for a man. Past time, however,
is never there in the present moment; to experience it we must always
carry it over into the present. Therefore in a human being there must
be forces for conserving the past, forces that do not arise out of
space and are therefore not to be understood as laws of nature
working spatially, for they are outside space.

These
indications point to the fact that if a man is to be the central point
of knowledge of the world and has to begin by knowing himself, he must
seek first of all within his own being for that which can raise him
above spatial existence — the sole existence of which the
senses tell — and can make him a being of time in the midst of
his spatial existence. Therefore, if he is to perceive his own being,
he must summon up from within himself cognitional powers which are
not bound up with his senses or his perception of space. It is at
this particular stage of human evolution, when natural science is
having so momentous an effort in focussing attention on the laws of
space, that, for reasons to be shown in these lectures, the true
being of man has in general been entirely lost to view. Hence it is
particularly necessary now to point out the inner experiences
which, as you have seen, lead a man out of space into time and its
experiences. We shall see how, going on from there, he actually
enters the spiritual world.

The knowledge
leading over from the world of the senses to the super-sensible has been
called, throughout the ages, Initiation-knowledge — knowledge,
that is, of what constitutes the true impulse, the active element, of
human personality. It is of this Initiation-knowledge that I have to
speak in these lectures, as far as is possible today. For our
intention is to study the evolution of the world and of man, in the
past, present and future, in the light of
Initiation-knowledge.

I shall
therefore have to begin by speaking of how such Initiation-knowledge
can be acquired. The very way in which these matters are spoken of
to-day clearly distinguishes present Initiation-knowledge from that
of the past. In the past, individual teachers wrestled their way
through to a perception of the super-sensible in the world and in man.
On the feelings of the students who came to them they made a strong
impression by dint of their purely human qualities, and the
students accepted the knowledge they offered, not under any
compulsion, but in response to the teacher's personal
authority.

Hence, for
the whole of man's evolution up to the present time, you will always find
described how there were separate groups of pupils, each under the
guidance of a teacher, a “guru”, to whose authority they
submitted. Even on this point — as on many others we shall come
across in these lectures — Initiation-knowledge to-day
cannot follow the old path. The “guru” never spoke of the
path by which he had achieved his own knowledge, and in those bygone
times public instruction about the road to higher knowledge was never
even considered. Such studies were pursued solely in the
Mystery-centres which in those days served as universities for those
following a super-sensible path.

In the view of
the general level of human consciousness which has been reached at this
moment in history, such a path would no longer be possible. Anyone
speaking of super-sensible knowledge to-day is therefore naturally
expected to say at once how this knowledge is to be acquired. At the
same time everyone must be left free to decide, in accordance
with his own way of life, his attitude to those exercises for body,
soul and spirit, through which certain forces within man are
developed. These forces look beyond the laws of nature, beyond the
present moment, into the true being of the world, and therewith
into the true being of man himself. Hence the obvious course for our
studies is to begin with at least a few preliminary remarks
about the way by which a man to-day can acquire knowledge of the
super-sensible.

We must thus
take our start from man as he really is in earthly existence, in relation
to space and the present moment. As an earthly being a man embraces in
his soul and bodily nature — I say deliberately soul and bodily
nature — a triad: a thinking being, a feeling being and a being
of will. And when we look at everything that lies in the realm of
thinking, in the realm of feeling and in that of the will, we have
seen all of the human being that takes part in earthly
existence.

Let us look
first at the most important factor in man through which he takes his place
in earthly existence. This is certainly his thinking. To his thinking
nature he owes the clear-headedness he needs, as earthly man, for
surveying the world. In comparison with this lucid thinking, his
feeling is obscure, and, as for his willing — those depths of
his being from which the will surges up — all that, for
ordinary observation, is entirely out of range.

Just think
how small a part your will plays in the ordinary world and in ordinary
experience. Say you make up your mind to move a chair. You first have
the thought of carrying it from one spot to another. You have a
concept of this. The concept then passes, in a way you know nothing
of, right into your blood and muscles. And what goes on in your blood
and muscles — and also in your nerves — while you are
lifting the chair and carrying it elsewhere, exists for you only as
an idea. The real inner activity that goes on within your skin
— of that you are wholly unconscious. Only the result comes
into your thought.

Thus, of
all your activities when awake, the will is the most unconscious. We
will speak later of activity during sleep. During waking activity the
will remains in absolute obscurity; a person knows as little about the
passing of his thought into willing as in ordinary life on Earth he
knows of what happens between falling asleep and waking. Even when
anyone is awake, he is asleep where the inner nature of the will is
concerned. It is only the faculty of forming concepts, of thinking,
that enters clearly into man's life on Earth. Feeling lies
midway between thinking and willing. And just as the dream
stands between sleeping and waking, as an indefinite, chaotic
conception, half-asleep, half-awake, so, coming halfway between
willing and thinking, feeling is really a waking dream of the soul.
We must take the clarity of thinking as our starting-point; but
how does thinking run its course in ordinary life on
Earth?

In the whole
life of a human being on Earth, thinking plays a quite passive role. Let
us be perfectly honest about this when observing ourselves. From the
moment of waking until going to sleep a man is preoccupied with the affairs
of the outer world. He lets sense-impressions flow into him, and with
them concepts are then united. When sense-impressions pass away, only
representations of them remain in the soul, turning gradually
into memories. But, as I have said, if as earthly beings we observe
ourselves honestly, we must admit that in concepts gained from
ordinary life there is nothing which has not come into the soul from
the external world through the senses. If without prejudice we
examine what we carry deep down in our souls, we shall always find it
was occasioned by some impression from without.

This applies
particularly to the illusions of those mystics who — I am
saying this expressly — do not penetrate to any great depth.
They believe that by means of a more or less nebulous spiritual
training they can come to an inward experience of a higher
divinity underlying the world. And these mystics, these half or
quarter mystics, are often heard to say how an inner light of the
soul has dawned within them, how they have had some kind of spiritual
vision.

Anyone who
observes himself closely and honestly will come to see that many mystical
visions can be traced to merely external sense-experiences
which have been transformed in the course of time. Strange as it may
seem, it is possible for some mystic, at the age perhaps of forty, to
think he has had a direct, imaginative impression, a vision, of
— we will take something concrete — the Mystery of
Golgotha, that he sees the Mystery of Golgotha inwardly, spiritually.
This gives him a feeling of great exaltation. Now a really good
psychologist, who can go back through this mystic's earthly life, may
find that as a boy of ten he was taken by his father on a visit,
where he saw a certain little picture. It was a picture of the
Mystery of Golgotha, and at the time it made hardly any
impression on his soul. But the impression remained, and in a
changed form sank deep down into his soul, to rise up in his fortieth
year as a great mystical experience.

This is
something to be stressed particularly when anyone ventures, more or less
publicly, to say anything about the paths to super-sensible knowledge.
Those who do not take the matter very seriously generally talk in a
superficial way. It is just those who wish to have the right to speak about
mystical, super-sensible paths who ought to know about the errors in
this sphere which can lead people astray. They ought fully to realise
that ordinary self-knowledge is chiefly made up of transformed
external impressions, and that genuine self-knowledge must be sought
to-day through inner development, by calling up forces in the
soul not previously there. This requires us to realise the passive
nature of our usual thinking. It deals with all impressions in the
way natural to the senses. The earlier things come first, the later
ones later; what is uppermost in thought remains above; what is below
remains below. As a rule, therefore — not only in ordinary life
but also in science — a man's concepts merely trail after
processes in the external world. Our science has gone so far as
to make an ideal of discovering how things run their course in the
external world without letting thinking have the slightest influence
on them. In their own sphere the scientists are quite right; by
following this method they have made enormous advances. But
they are more and more losing sight of man's true being. For the
first step in those methods for developing inner forces of the soul
leading to super-sensible cognition, called by us meditation and
concentration, is by finding the way over from purely passive
thinking to thinking that is inwardly active.

I will begin
by describing this first step in a quite elementary way. Instead of a
concept aroused by something external, we can take a concept
drawn entirely from within and give it the central place in our
consciousness. What is important is not that the concept should
correspond to a reality, but that it should be drawn up out of the
depths of the soul as something active. Hence it is not good to take
anything we remember, for in memory all manner of vague impressions
cling to our concepts. If, therefore, we draw upon our memory we
shall neither be sure that we are not letting extraneous things
creep in, nor sure that we have really set about meditating with
proper inward activity. There are three possible ways of
proceeding, and there need be no loss of independence on any of
them. A simple, easily apprehended concept is preferable, a
creation of the moment, not having anything to do with what is
remembered. For our purpose it can even be something quite
paradoxical, deliberately removed from any passively received idea.
We have only to make sure that the meditation has been brought about
through our own inner activity.

The second way
is to go to someone with experience in this sphere and ask him to suggest
a subject for meditation. There may then be fear of becoming dependent
on him. If, however, from the moment the meditation is
received, one is conscious that every step has been taken
independently, through an inner activity of one's own, and that the
only thing not determined by oneself is the subject, which, since it
comes from someone else, has to be actively laid hold of — when
one is conscious of all this, there is no longer any question of
dependence. It is then particularly necessary to continue to act in
full consciousness.

And finally,
the third way. Instruction can be sought from a teacher who — one
might say — remains invisible. The student takes a book he has never
seen before, opens it at random and reads any chance sentence. He can
thus be sure of coming on something entirely new to him, and
then he must work on it with inner activity. A subject for meditation
can be made of the sentence, or perhaps of some illustration or
diagram in the book, so long as he is certain he has never previously
come across it. That is the third method, and in this way a teacher
can be created out of nothing. The book has to be found and looked
at, and a sentence, a drawing, or anything else chosen from it
— all this constitutes the teacher.

Hence it is
perfectly possible nowadays to take the path to higher knowledge in such
a way that the active thinking required will not be unjustifiably
encroached on by any other power. This is essential for present-day
mankind. In the course of these lectures we shall see how necessary
it is for people to-day, especially when they wish to make progress
on the path to higher worlds, to respect and treasure their own free
will. For how, otherwise, is any inner activity to be developed?
Directly anyone becomes dependent on someone else, his own will is
frustrated. And it is important that meditation to-day should be
carried through with inner activity, out of the will in thinking,
which is hardly at all valued to-day, with modern science putting all
the emphasis on passive observation of the outer world.

In this way
we can win through to active thinking, the rate of progress depending
wholly on the individual. One man will get there in three weeks, if he
perseveres with the same exercises. Another will take five
years, another seven, and someone else nineteen, and so on. The
essential point is that he should never relax his efforts. A moment
will come when he recognises that his thinking has really changed:
it no longer runs on in the old passive pictures but is inwardly full
of energy — a force which, although he experiences it quite
clearly, he knows to be just as much a force as the force
required to raise an arm or point a finger. We come to know a
thinking that seems to sustain our whole being, a thinking that can
hit against an obstacle. This is no figure of speech, but a concrete
truth that we can experience. We know that ordinary thinking does no
such thing. When I run up against a wall and get hurt, my physical
body has received a blow through force of contact. This force of
contact depends on my being able to hit my body against objects. It
is I who do the hitting. The ordinary passive thinking does not hit
anything, but simply presents itself to be hit, for it has no
reality; it is only a picture. But the thinking to which we come in
the way described is a reality, something in which we live. It can
hit against something as a finger can hit the wall. And just as we
know that our finger cannot go through the wall, so we know that with
this real thinking we cannot fathom everything. It is a first
step. We have to take this step, this turning of one's own active
thinking into an organ of touch for the soul, so that we may feel
ourselves thinking in the same way that we walk, grasp or touch; so
that we know we are living in a real being, not just in ordinary
thinking which merely creates images, but in a reality, in the soul's
organ of touch which we ourselves have become.

That is the
first step — to change our thinking so that we feel: Now you yourself
have become the thinker. That rounds off everything. With this thinking it
is not the same as with physical touch. An arm, for instance, grows
as we grow, so that when we are full-grown our proportions remain
correct. But the thinking that has become active is like a snail
— able to extend feelers or to draw them in again. In this
thinking we live in a being certainly full of force but inwardly
mobile, moving backwards and forwards, inwardly active. With this
far-reaching organ of touch we can — as we shall see —
feel about in the spiritual world; or, if this is spiritually
painful, draw back.

All this must
certainly be taken seriously by those with any desire to approach the
true being of man — this transformation of one's whole
nature. For we do not discover what a man actually is unless we start
by seeing in him something beyond what is perceived by our
earthly senses. All that is developed through the activity of
thinking is a man's first super-sensible member — later I shall
be describing it more fully. First we have man's physical body that
can be perceived by our ordinary sense-organs, and this offers
resistance on meeting the ordinary organs of touch. Then we
have our first super-sensible member — we can call it the
etheric body or the formative forces body. It must be called
something, but the name is immaterial. In future I will call it the
etheric or formative forces body. Here we have our first
super-sensible member, just as perceptible for a higher power of
touching, into which thinking has been changed, as physical things
are perceptible to the physical sense of touch. Thinking becomes a
super-sensible touching, and through this super-sensible touching the
etheric or formative forces body can be, in the higher sense, both
grasped and seen. This is the first real step, as it were, into the
super-sensible world.

From the very
way in which I have tried to describe the passing over of thinking into
the experience of an actual force within one, you will realise how little
sense there is, where genuine spiritual development is concerned, in
saying, for example, that anyone who wishes to enter the spiritual
world by this path is merely indulging in fantasy or yielding to
auto-suggestion. For it is the first reaction of many people to say:
“Anyone who talks of the higher worlds in connection with a
training of this kind is simply picturing what he has suggested to
himself.” Then others take up the refrain, perhaps
saying: “It is even possible that someone who loves lemonade
has only to think of it and his mouth immediately begins to water,
just as though he were drinking lemonade. Auto-suggestion has such
power!”

All this may
certainly be so, and anyone who is taking the rightful path we have
indicated into the spiritual world must be well up in the things that
physiologists and psychologists can get to know intellectually, and
he should have a thoroughly practical acquaintance with the
precautions that have to be observed. But to anyone who believes he
can persuade himself by auto-suggestion that he is drinking
lemonade, although he has none, I would reply: “Yes, that is
possible — but show me the man who has quenched a real thirst
with imaginary, auto-suggested lemonade!” That is where the
difference begins between what is merely imagined passively and what
is actually experienced. By keeping in touch with the real world and
making our thinking active, we reach the stage of living spiritually
in the world in such a way that thinking develops into a touching.
Naturally it is a touching that has nothing to do with chairs or
tables; but we learn to touch in the spiritual world, to make contact
with it, to enter into a living relation with it. It is precisely by
means of this active thinking that we learn to distinguish between
the mystical fancies of auto-suggestion and the experience of
spiritual reality.

All these
objections arise from people not having yet looked into the way modern
Initiation-knowledge describes the path for to-day. They are content
to judge from outside a matter of which they may have heard
simply the name, or of which they have gained a little superficial
knowledge. Those who enter the spiritual world in the way here
described, which enables them to make contact with it and to touch
it, know how to distinguish between merely forming a subsequent
concept of what they have experienced through active thinking and the
perceptive experience itself. In ordinary life we can quite well
distinguish between the experience of inadvertently burning our
finger and a picturing of the incident afterwards! There is a
most convincing difference, for in one case the finger is actually
painful, in the other it is painful only in imagination. The
same difference is encountered on a higher level between ideas we
have of the spiritual world and what we actually experience
there.

Now the first
thing attained in this way is true self-knowledge. For, just as in
life we have for our immediate perception a table here, chairs
over there, and this whole splendid hall — with the clock that
isn't going! — and so on; just as all this stands before us in
space, and we perceive it at any moment, so, to the thinking that has
become active and real, the world of time makes itself known —
at first in the form of the time-world that is bound up with the
human being himself. Past experiences that can normally be recovered
only as memory-images stand before him as an immediately present
tableau of long past events. The same thing is described by
people who experience a shock through the threat of imminent death by
drowning perhaps; and what they describe is confirmed — I
always add this — by persons who think in an entirely
materialistic way. To someone in mortal peril there may flash up an
inward tableau of his past life. And this in fact is what happens
also to people who have made their thinking active; suddenly before
their souls arises a tableau of their life from the moment when they
first learnt to think up to the present. Time becomes space; the past
becomes present; a picture stands before their souls. The most
characteristic feature of this experience — I shall have to go
into it more closely to-morrow — is that, because the whole
thing is like a picture, one still has a certain feeling of
space, but only a feeling. For the space now experienced
lacks the third dimension; it is two-dimensional only, as with a
picture. For this reason I call this cognition Imaginative
— a picture-cognition that works, as in a painting, with two
dimensions.

You may ask:
When I have this experience of only two dimensions, what happens if,
still experiencing two dimensions, I go further? That makes no
difference. We lose all experience of a third dimension. On a later
occasion I will speak of how, in our day, because there is no longer
any consciousness of such things, people searching for the
spiritual look for a fourth dimension as a way towards it. The truth
is that when we go on from the physical to the spiritual, no fourth
dimension appears, but the third dimension drops away. We must get
used to the real facts in this sphere, as we have had to do in
others. It was once thought that the earth was flat, and ran off into
an indefinite region where it came to an abrupt end; and just as it
was an advance when people knew that if we sail round the earth we
come back to our starting-point, so it will be an advance in our
inner comprehension of the world when we know that, in the
spiritual world, we do not go on from first, second, third dimensions
to a fourth, but back to two dimensions only. And we shall see how,
eventually, we go back to only one. That is the true state of
affairs.

We can see
how, in observing the outer world, people today cling in a superficial
way to numbers: first dimension, second, third — and so a
fourth must follow. No, we turn back to two dimensions; the third
dissolves and we arrive at a truly Imaginative-knowledge. It comes to
us first as a tableau of our life, when we survey in mighty pictures
the experiences of our past earthly life and how we have inwardly
gone through them. And this differs considerably from simple
memories.

Ordinary
memory-pictures make us feel that they come essentially from
conceptions of the outside world, experiences of pleasure,
pain, of what other people have done to us, of their attitude towards
us. That is what we chiefly experience in our purely conceptual
memories.

In the tableau
of which I am speaking, it is different. There we experience —
well, let us take an example. Perhaps we met someone ten years ago.
In ordinary memory we would see how he came to meet us, what he did
to us that was good or bad, and so on. But in the life-tableau we
re-live our first sight of the man, what we did and experienced
ourselves in order to gain his friendship, what our impressions
were. Thus in the tableau we feel what unfolds outwardly from within
us, whereas ordinary memory shows what develops inwardly from
without.

So of the
tableau we can say that it brings us something like a present experience
in which one thing does not follow another, as in recollection, but one
thing is side-by-side with another in two-dimensional space. Hence
the life-tableau can be readily distinguished from
memory-pictures.

Now what is
gained from this is an enhancement of our inner activity, the active
experience of one's own personality. That is the essential feature of
it. One lives in and develops more intensively the forces which
radiate from the personality. Having gone through this
experience, we have to climb a further step, and this is something
that nobody does at all willingly. It entails the most rigorous inner
discipline. For what is experienced through this life-tableau,
through the pictures presenting one's own experiences to the soul,
gives us, even in the case of past experiences that were actually
painful, a feeling of personal happiness. A tremendously strong
feeling of happiness is united with this Imaginative
knowledge.

It is this
subjective feeling of happiness which has inspired all those religious
ideals and descriptions — in Mohammedanism, for instance —
where life beyond the Earth is pictured in such glowing terms. They are
an Imaginative result of this experience of happiness.

If the next
step is to be made, this feeling of happiness must be forgotten. For
when in perfect freedom we have first exerted our will to make our
thinking active through meditation and concentration, as I have
described, and by means of this active thinking we have advanced to
experience of the life-tableau, we have then to use all our strength
in blotting this out from our consciousness. In ordinary life this
blotting out is often all too easy. Those who go in for examinations
have good reason to complain of it! Ordinary sleep, too, is finally
nothing but a passive wiping out of everything in our daytime
consciousness. For the examination candidate would hardly wipe out
his knowledge consciously; it is a passive process, a sign of
weakness in one's command of present events. When, however, the
required strength has been gained, this wiping out is necessary for
the next step towards super-sensible knowledge.

Now it easily
happens that, by concentrating all the forces of his soul on a subject he
himself has chosen, a man develops a desire to cling to it, and
because a feeling of happiness is connected with this
life-tableau, he clings to it all the more readily and firmly. But
one must be able to extinguish from consciousness the very thing one
has striven for through the enhancement of one's powers. As I have
pointed out, this is much more difficult than the blotting out of
anything in ordinary life.

You will no
doubt be aware that when a person's sense-impressions have been
gradually shut off; when all is dark around him and he can see
nothing; when all noise is shut out so that he hears nothing and even
the day's impressions are suppressed, he falls asleep. This empty
consciousness, that comes to anyone on the verge of sleep, now has to
be brought about at will. But while all conscious impressions, even
those self-induced, have to be blotted out, it is most important for
the student to remain awake. He must have the strength, the inner
activity, to keep awake while no longer receiving impressions
from without, or any experiences whatever. An empty consciousness is
thus produced, but an empty consciousness of which one is fully
aware.

When all that
has been first brought to consciousness through enhanced forces has been
wiped out and the consciousness made empty, it does not remain so, for
then the second stage of knowledge is entered. In contrast to
Imaginative knowledge, we may call it Inspired knowledge. If we
have striven for empty consciousness by preparation of this kind
— then, just as the visible world is normally there for our
eyes to see and the world of sound for our ears to hear — it
becomes possible for the spiritual world to present itself to our
soul. It is no longer our own experiences, but a spiritual world that
presses in on us. And if we are so strong that we have been able to
suppress the entire life-tableau all at once — letting it
appear and then blotting it out, so that after experiencing it
we empty our consciousness of it — than the first perception to
arise in this emptiness is of our pre-earthly life — the life
before conception and descent into a physical body. This is the first
real super-sensible experience that comes to a man after he has
emptied his consciousness — he looks at his own pre-earthly
life. From that moment he comes to know the side of immortality which
is never brought out to-day. People talk of immortality only as the
negation of death. Certainly this side of immortality is as important
as the other — we shall have much more to say about it —
but the immortality we first come to know in the way I have
briefly indicated is not the negation of death, but
“unbornness”, the negation of birth; and both sides are
equally real. Only when people come once more to understand that
eternity has these two sides — immortality and
“unbornness” — will they be able to recognise again
in man that which is enduring, truly eternal.

Modern languages
all have a word for immortality, but they have lost the word
“unbornness”, although older languages had it. This
side of eternity, “unbornness”, was lost first, and now,
in this materialistic age, the tragic moment is threatening when all
knowledge of immortality may be lost — for in the realm of pure
materialism people are no longer willing to know anything whatever of
the spiritual part of man.

To-day I
have been able to indicate — and quite briefly — only the
very first steps on the path to super-sensible worlds. During the next
few days something further will be described, and then we shall turn
back to what can be known on that path about man and the world, in
the present and past, and also to what needs to be known for the
future.